Delsea JROTC Rifle team prepares for national competition in Ohio

FRANKLIN TWP. — Looking to continue their recent string of success, the Delsea Regional High School JROTC Air Rifle team was back at work getting ready Tuesday for the National Matches in Camp Perry, Ohio.

After placing first in the National Army JROTC Air Rifle Championship qualifier for the third year in a row and setting a team score record for a Northeastern team with 1,010 points, the team is now eyeing a bigger prize in Ohio.

Led by team captain Alicia Pugliese and star riflewoman Ginneane Folcarelli, the team is currently ranked 7th out of 79 teams in the 2nd ROTC Brigade, which includes schools from the entire Northeast region of the country.

In the JROTC's 18 years of having programs at the high school, the rifle team now sits in the best position they ever have, with true aspirations to defeat some of the nation’s most established rifle teams.

“They have far exceeded my expectations,” said team coach Lieutenant Colonel Dane Woytek. “We’re competing against schools that have had rifle teams for 50 or more years.”

Woytek has taken the team to the top 10 percent in the region in a relatively short period of time.

After 22 years of active service in the U.S. Army, Woytek then went on to train the JROTC rifle team in Riverside High School, in Burlington County, for 14 years before being poached by Delsea.

In just three years, the team has gone from a five-member team of relative obscurity and turned itself into one of the region’s strongest teams.

Tuesday’s practice consisted of three positions of firing: prone, kneeling and standing — all of which will be on display at the competition in Ohio.

Practicing in the high school cafeteria, the team shoots at 10 sets of bullseye targets to prepare for the competition in Ohio, where teammates will be given 10 minutes to fire at targets in the kneeling and standing positions and 15 minutes in the prone position.

The members of the team all attribute their success to Lt. Col. Woytek, who will be retiring as the head coach of the team at the end of the school year.

The students say his commitment to the program and his ability to keep them disciplined and focused is what has carried them to where they are now.

“He pushes us to do what we’re capable of doing,” said Alicia. “We all want to keep that number one status.”

But for Alicia and Ginneane, their ability to lead the team to one of the best teams in the region was not necessarily something the two had envisioned when they first stepped into the halls of Delsea Regional High School.

Alicia said she hadn’t belonged to many extracurricular activities before the JROTC and only knew about the JROTC program because of her brother.

“I’d see him in uniform and I’d ask ‘What is that for?’” said Alicia. “I thought that it’s something new and it might help me open up. It’s a sport that I can do and do well in.”

“Neither (she nor Ginneane) expected us to be that good,” added Alicia.

Ginneane comes from a family of hunters and is someone who simply states “I like guns” as her reason for the interest in the team.

Having been around guns since she was three years old and firing her first gun when she was seven, she has emerged as one of the brightest firers on the team.

In her third year on the team, Ginneane is ranked 50th out of 2,893 firers in the region, placing her in the top 1 percent and someone that Lt. Col. Woytek admits is the team’s best shooter who has helped them place so highly the past three years.

But for all the individual achievement on the team, everyone attributes the team’s ambitious goals to the sense of family that surrounds the group of high schoolers.

“We get close. We’re like family,” said Alicia. “Even when I graduate, (they’re) still going to be my team.”

Woytek calls his success with the Delsea team “the highlight” of his 20 years being a teacher in the field, saying the program promotes a type of camaraderie that may not be found in other organized sports, with brothers and sisters who used to participate in JROTC programs coming to practices and competitions to see their younger siblings perform.

“It’s the element of watching them mature into young men and women,” said Woytek. “It’s just a family atmosphere.”

The team will be traveling to Camp Perry, Ohio on Feb. 19 to prepare for the JROTC’s National Matches, which take place on Feb. 20.